Film Reviews by Alphaville

Gravity raised the bar for what we expect from films set in space and Life does not disappoint. The whole film is set in a space station in zero gravity and the production design is dazzling. The long pre-titles sequence, in which the flowing camera follows the astronauts as they fly around the station, is mesmerising. The plot develops into an intense survival story when a minute Martian life form is taken on board, starts to grow and turns nasty. The pitch is Gravity meets Alien, but it’s better than Alien.

Alien’s main shock tactic was the old stand-by of having its characters wander through dark spaces while we wait for something to jump out at them. Life is more imaginative. Unlike in lesser sci-fi films, the plot is scientifically grounded and all the station crew are realistic and personable astronauts, which adds to the impact of the alien’s disregard for human life. Tension and shocks come from the nature of the beast itself, whose metabolism is apparently based on that of slime mould (see DVD extras). The zero-G camerawork, accomplished using wires, is fluid and captivating, spatially disorienting the viewer and adding to the other-worldliness of the events on screen.

Director Daniel Espinosa’s aim was to make a sci-fi creature feature that was both ‘plausible and terrifying’. He’s succeeded. Trailer notes: the trailer should be applauded for not giving too much away but is still best avoided.

Although filmed on an epic scale, this story of the battle against drugs on the Mekong River is a mess of a movie. Filmed with a scattergun approach to both plotting and cinemaphotography, it’s difficult to follow and, although based on true events, difficult to care about. Action set pieces are ruined by shakycam and rapid editing. A shoot-out in a cave could have been interesting but the footage only lasts a few seconds, which is typical of the film not being able to distinguish between what works and what doesn’t. It’s as if director Dante Lam has been watching too many Paul Greengrass films. It’s real disappointment from him after films such as The Beast Stalker.

Director Zhang Yimou has a way with landscape and it’s worth watching this most expensive film in Chinese history (and first major co-production with America) if only for the amazing scenery. As for the action, it’s comic-book, spaghetti-eastern nonsense. The creature-feature story is sheer rubbish. Swarms of demon monsters are dispatched like orcs while Matt Damon fails to convince under Zhang’s translated direction.

As you’d expect from Zhang, there’s lots of colourful dressing up and mass drumming and silly battling interspersed with boring exposition. His concentration on the visual spectacle is laudable but, as in some of his previous work, it’s not enough to carry the film when the script is so awful. How to kill the hordes of attacking creatures? Bungee jump into their midst from the Great Wall. It’s ridiculous. Is that really the best they could come up with? Nevertheless, the scenes filmed around the Painted Mountains and Wangmang Mountain are mesmerising.

This underpowered historical drama about the adventures of Percy Fawcett in South America has a TV vibe. There’s plenty of opportunity here for jungle drama and excitement but James Gray directs by the numbers with static camera and can’t imbue his characters with any dynamism. It’s all dressing up and restrained acting, like a TV period drama. The action flits between London and the jungle with no sense of timing, pacing or development. The acting is stagey to say the least. Charlie Hunnam as Fawcett has no screen presence, while even Robert Pattinson lacks his usual charisma. Of the main characters, only Sienna Miller as the long-suffering wife rises above the film’s deadening hand.

It’s one thing to be true to Fawcett’s memory, but real life rarely has the drama or pacing required to make a successful movie plot, not when filmed as painstakingly as this. It’s a missed opportunity to do Fawcett justice and make what could have been an exciting and inspiring adventure story.

A modern take on a traditional Korean fairy-tale, Kim Jee-woon’s third (2003) feature is as gorgeously filmed as you’d expect from the visually imaginative director. It’s also something of a slow-moving tour de force. As a horror story it never really gets going. Most viewers will find it a long drawn-out affair, long on creepy atmosphere but short on incident. There’s a brilliant reveal after 75min but you may not care by then. A disappointing watch.

Three computer nerds may have had contact with aliens and be infected with alien DNA. Things may not be as they seem, especially with their bodies. Dr Laurence Fishburne investigates in a protective suit in a secure facility. It’s mysterious and fascinating. All our trapped hero Brenton Thwaites wants to do is escape, but is that safe? What new powers might he possess? It gets compellingly weirder as it progresses.

Thrilling in parts, disturbing in parts, this is a much more thoughtful film than the average dumb blockbuster. It’s imaginatively shot in the American west, with great effects for a small budget, and is a great calling card for writer/director William Eubank. One caveat: on the DVD commentary the director and his two co-writers come across as irritating gaming nerds who think everything is brilliant, man. Amazingly, they’ve crafted an engrossing movie.

This cod-Austen shenanigans has less substance than the emperor’s clothes. The cast do their best with the stilted dialogue but can do little with their stylised characters, which have the depth of cardboard. On wishes devoutly that they wouldst vouchsafe their smug opinions less and do something interesting.

In any case, the film opens with so many confusing characters, whose relationships are indicated by brief subtitles, that many viewers will soon give up caring. This difficulty is even hinted at by one of the cast on the ‘Making Of’ DVD extra. Jaded critics found the stilted dialogue witty. The viewer is more likely to find it wince-inducing.

The film is based on an early Austen novella but it plays like a misconceived am-dram concocted by a talentless Austen wannabe who just doesn’t get her. The culprit is writer/director and arthouse favourite Whit Stillman, whose visual sense is as perfunctory as ever. Point the camera and shoot. The whole adds up to a stagey exercise in emptiness. It even makes Pride and Prejudice and Zombies seem like a masterpiece. One star for the production values and costumes.

Despite a poor opening, this is a top-drawer loner-seeks-vengeance western. Like John Wick in the Wild West, our loner hero (Ethan Hawke) is lumbered with flashbacks and a dog that understands everything he says to it – a stagey device to allow the viewer to know what he’s thinking. Happily matters improve when baddies rightly take umbrage with the mutt and give Ethan cause to advance the plot and begin his revenge spree. Not before he explains all this over the dog’s grave, of course.

Although there’s too much time spent anthropomorphising the animal as if it were Rin Tin Tin, the excellence of the film’s second half surprisingly turns it into an irresistible western, rising to an exciting climax laced with deadpan humour. Even John Travolta as the town marshall Ethan is up against puts in a solid shift for once, and there’s an appealing dynamic with the teenage hotel keeper (Taissa Farmiga) who takes a shine to the loner in town. A spaghetti western vibe adds to the fun, especially in the opening titles and in Jeff Grace’s iconic score, paying homage to Morricone.

Once it gets going, this is writer/director Ti West’s best film yet and, if not reaching the status of classics such as Unforgiven and Open Range, proves that a good western can still hit the spot.

Poor hitman Keanu Reeves, lumbered with flashbacks and a dog we’re supposed to find cute. Happily the mutt’s bumped off by some Russians in order for a plot to kick in. Plot? He spends the remainder of the film bludgeoning his way through the gang. Luckily they can’t shoot straight and they come at him one at as time like in martial arts films. A percussive score tries but fails to make it exciting. Instead it’s contrived, repetitive, cartoonish and sorely lacking in imagination. Even worse, so many people liked the mind-numbing violence that they made a sequel.

This is a film overawed by its subject matter – the 2013 Boston marathon bombing – and its need to pay homage to the heroes and victims. It’s more of a commemoration to Boston and its inhabitants than it is a feature film. The first half is awful, totally unfocussed and filled with banal backstory snippets and newsreel-type depiction of the marathon and the bombing chaos itself. It plays like Act 1 of a 70s disaster movie.

The characters’ real-life counterparts appear on camera themselves at the end of the film and provide moving testimony, but their on-screen portrayal is sketchy and mawkish. They say ‘I love you’ over and over again to plinky-plonk piano muzak you just want to stop. The score, by the normally brilliant Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross, is terrible.

But just when you think the film will never be anything but a drawn-out news bulletin, it changes tack and gathers momentum. The second hour develops into the search for the bombers and, as a piece of thrilling cinema, it starts to grab the attention. Director Peter Berg is at his best when he’s able to focus on these more contained confrontations and milk them for tension and thrills, as he did in Lone Survivor.

There are some exciting incidents that almost save the film, but then it returns to the mawkishness with which it began. American critics like this film, as they did Berg’s similar Deepwater Horizon, but they’re judging the concept rather than what’s on-screen. Perhaps it’s best viewed in this light, as a well-intentioned commemoration of a tragic event, its heroes and victims and even the city of Boston itself.

You want to know what’s wrong with arthouse cinema? Try to watch this so-called ‘film’ – a dreadful 250 minute sequence of static, stagey, score-less, tell-don’t-show scenes. You know the kind – longueur after longueur of silences mingled with people yapping away while nothing at all happens on screen. In short, the antithesis of cinema.

Supposedly a Filipino re-imagining of Crime and Punishment, it’s a crime against cinema and a punishment to sit through. On the DVD cover the Guardian’s Peter Bradshaw calls it ‘gripping’ and the Daily Telegraph’s Tim Robey calls it ‘spellbinding’. Some critics should have their licences revoked. Somebody tell them that film is a visual medium. We must stop them now before they encourage more of this deplorable drivel.

There’s a plane crash. Air traffic controller feels guilty, husband of dead family feels grief. As the trailer has it. ‘two lives will collide’. If only. It’s based on a true story but the by-the-numbers plot arc and emotional drama make for predictable cinema. In fact you don’t need to watch the film at all. The trailer will tell you everything and save you having to sit through it.

This insufferable Sundance-winning high school talkfest stars the supremely irritating Miles Teller. Described as ‘an effortless charmer’, he’ll have you pressing the off button in less than two minutes. If you don’t believe that, check him out on the trailer.

Creepy IT expert takes a fancy to his boss’s (Pierce Brosnan’s) teenage daughter. Pierce gives him the brush-off. Mistake. Cue an engrossing thriller that’s also a commentary on the dependency of modern society on computers and hackable personable data: financial records, social media, medical records, even a hi-tech house and car. Can Pierce fight back as his life is pulled apart by the IT guy?

The film was unfairly panned by critics but it’s a terrific premise whose pace never lets up. It has no pretensions to being other than a good tense thriller, but in that it succeeds admirably. John Moore directs with visual flair and Timothy Williams contributes a thumping score. Well worth a look.

You’ve probably given up on M. Night Shyamalan by now, but you might want to give him another shot with this. James McAvoy has 23 multiple personalities, kidnaps three teenage girls and keeps them in a locked room. You’d think the girls would take one of several opportunities to beat him over the head with one implement or another, especially in his 9yo boy guise, but we have to skip over this gaping plot hole. After all, it isn’t Room.

There’s very little variety in what happens on screen except to explore McAvoy’s various personalities, padded out with a subplot concerning his psychiatrist and pointless flashbacks to our main heroine’s childhood. However, there’s a nice sense of foreboding as we learn that there may be a 24th personality called the Beast. This builds to a silly but fun climax and a great coda. This is a flawed film, but at least it’s a Night film you want to keep watching.